‘Summertime’ by J.M. Coetzee

My favourite by a country (that’s longer than an urban one, right?) mile of the Man Booker Prize shortlist so far. I’ve only read one Coetzee – ‘Disgrace’ – previously, which I do remember I liked a lot although I struggle to remember what it was about, now. Was there a dog in it or was that the cover? Anyway, my slight OCD is uncomfortable that I have allowed myself to read this one without reading the two before in the series; ‘Boyhood’ and ‘Youth’, Coetzee’s biographical, rather than autobiographical, accounts of earlier periods of his life.

‘Summertime’ as I had read/heard before I picked this up, is a biography of Coetzee, written by himself, after his death, concerned with his life in his thirties in the 1970′s in South Africa.

No plot as such, but this did not matter. Mr Vincent is the name of the fictional biographer, which is virtually all we know of him, as he interviews five characters involved with Coetzee during this time; a lover (Julia), a cousin (Margot), an object of Coetzee’s unreciprocated love (Adriana), a male colleague (Martin) and a female colleague/lover (Sophie).

I like the premise of the book. Quirky! Writing your story from a third party perspective after your death which hasn’t happened yet. Obviously, otherwise you couldn’t be writing it. I like the different Points Of View. I like the fragmentation. I like his writing. Although he did have me a bit worried at the start with this:

“How to escape the filth: not a new question. An old rat-question that will not let go, that leaves its nasty, suppurating wound. Agenbite of inwit.”

What on earth does that last sentence mean? I will have to look it up. Bear with me, reader.

I have, and the Urban Dictionary informs me it is a Middle English phrase meaning “remorse of conscience”. Am glad I cleared that up.

I like the way he makes me think. There was a constant back-chat of narrative in a secondary layer of my mind, thinking about what he was saying about politics, love, familial relationships.

And no-one said how funny it was. I was reading the ‘Julia’ section this morning on the tube with a huge smile on my face, giggling away. When he first met Julia in a supermarket he poked her in her breast with two rolls of Christmas wrapping paper she had dropped and he had picked up for her. The absurdity and cheekiness of this moment caught me. Julia is hilarious. This is one of my favourite bits of her, in dialogue with him about his writing, following his gift to her of a proof copy of his new book:

“No-one is immortal. Books are not immortal. The entire globe on which we stand is going to be sucked into the sun and burnt to cinder. After which the universe itself will implode and disappear down a black hole. Nothing is going to survive, not me, not you, and certainly not minority-interest books about imaginary frontiersmen in eighteenth-century South Africa.”

And this bit too, and both these extracts for me made me question the veracity of the characters in this portrayal of Coetzee’s life. Are they real or are they vehicles for his voice? The whole way through I was wondering what was true and what isn’t and I can’t possibly know. For me then, in a way, this was a masterclass in the unreliable narrator. How fictional is this thing? Anyway, here it is:

“Yet what was wrong with bigamy, come to think of it, aside from it being against the law? What made bigamy a crime when adultery was only a sin, or recreation? I was already an adulteress; why should I not be a bigamist or bigamiste too? This was Africa, after all. If no African man was going to be hauled before a court for having two wives, why should I be forbidden to have two spouses, a public one and a private one?”

I know nothing of Coetzee as a man. I’ll do some research after this. As I have said, I am unsure of what is fiction and what is fact having read this. And I wallow in the uncertainty. It’s rather fun, liberating, not to be sure. To be played with. One thing I do know is that it’s the ideas that keep me spellbound, like in Douglas Coupland’s writing, not the plot and certainly not the action, since there’s not a lot. And Coetzee is cringworthily self-depreciating. As any decent human being would be I guess, when doing something as embarrassing as writing their own biography. He’s sexless, mediocre, “tepid” as a character in the descriptions here; all of which I found highly amusing. He rips himself to pieces. He left his writing as pretty much the single positive, destroying himself as a man. Which in itself is interesting as I’ve said before where is the division between the person and their body of work? But is it really true? His characters, his narrators, his witnesses, debate him. Sophie says:

“Nothing is worth fighting for. You compel me into defending his position, a position I do not happen to share. Nothing is worth fighting for because fighting only prolongs the cycle of aggression and retaliation.”

Like Sarah Waters, his writing is generally clean and spare – not lyrical or flowery. Description takes a back seat to ideas. I did like this bit though, although, I guess I picked up on it as a result of his refusal to use the word “eyes” twice. Repetition – writers really hate it:

“His father opens his eyes. Generally he is sceptical about the capacity of the ocular orbs to express complex feelings, but this time he is shaken. The look his father gives him speaks of utter indifference: indifference to him, indifference to Acme Auto, indifference to everything but the fate of his own soul in the prospect of eternity.”

But my very favourite line of all, possibly because it references one of my favourite things, that really warms me to Coetzee the man to whom I was already very warm but who I thought I didn’t ever see that clearly because sometimes the biography, on the characters’ own admittance at times is about their lives, not his, was this:

“But he was by nature very cautious, very much the tortoise. When he sensed danger, he would withdraw into his shell.”

So I have two left to go now (off the Man Booker Prize shortlist), assuming that I don’t run the gauntlet of ‘Wolf Hall’ again. I think Tim’s comment on my post about this yesterday may have allowed me to forgive myself this aberration. ‘Summertime’ is my absolute winner so far. Do I think it will win the prize? It’s not got the odds at the bookies. And he’s won twice before and the Nobel, so perhaps someone else should have a go. But if it’s the best book, that’s not a good reason for it not to win, is it? Also, I feel that, even though I haven’t, it should be read with its predecessors. Which I will now add to my ever increasing backlog of must-reads.

PS 6th October – the prize will be announced tonight! And Coetzee’s not turning up to the ceremony. He’s one of the Reclusivity.

PPS 6th October again. A little bit of research shows that in the ’70s Coetzee was married with two medium sized children. Now, I may not have been concentrating, this has been known to happen, but I didn’t really notice a lot about this in ‘Summertime’. So, then, can I conclude, this is heavily fictional? If so, what motivation other than playfulness? His reclusive nature would suggest he’s very private, or shy, or both and by writing his own biography would pre-empt someone else’s attempt? Throw them off the track? Or draw more attention to himself? The mystery quite unravels me.

PPPS 6th October. AGAIN. OMG! He used to work for IBM!